The Book of Mormon claims to have originally been recorded in Reformed Egyptian, some combination of Jewish language and Egyptian characters. There is little outside evidence for such a form of writing, though of course that doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist.
The Reformed Egyptian characters published by Joseph Smith bear a passing resemblance to vignettes of Egyptian script published in a book by Caylus and Barthelemy or to shorthand. (Was this shorthand available at the time of publication?) [1]
Note that Lehi and his family wouldn’t have known the Hebrew alphabet we are familiar with today. It was derived from Aramaic script after the Babylonian captivity. The Hebrew script used at the time was the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.
Freethinker's Book of Mormon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at www.blakeclan.org.